Review: Resident Evil: Extinction
I have never played a Resident Evil game or watched one of the 1,276 movies based on the property. The first three entries aren't streaming on a service I use, but I should be able to drop in on number four and follow along just fine, right? Right?
For time immemorial (or at least since 1968) zombie movies have followed a common template. The tropes and story beats of the zombie apocalypse are remarkably enduring for a genre of storytelling about decay.* The Resident Evil franchise is about zombies, and so it features all of the mandatory zombie stuff: Somebody gets bit and hides it from their friends; scientists in white lab coats conduct experiments on a zombie in captivity; a group of protagonists is steadily widdled down by the zombie horde across the course of the film. Despite all of those familiar elements, however, I'll admit that I was lost as hell during any scene that didn't allow me to draw on my zombie movie literacy to follow along. And that confusion kind of saved the movie for me.
Let's start here - Resident Evil: Extinction kind of sucks. The acting is mostly wooden, and there isn't a single character that experiences a discernable arc. This was the 2000s, so ugly CGI blood is flying all over the screen, and more generally the physical action is directed in a way that is unappealing and at times illegible. Harsh, I know, but you can sense the "but" coming, can't you? Here's the thing - we review 31 horror movies a year here at FlipFlopSlapFight, and we watch even more than that. Crappy movies are an occupational hazard. One of the things that makes that palatable is dissecting the nuance of bad cinema, because there are infinite ways to fail at making a movie, and knowing which ones you prefer can help you extract some joy from something that a more casual viewer might dismiss out of hand. I was never under the illusion that I was watching a great zombie movie, and I probably knew that before I clicked play to be honest, but I was pretty invested in the experience the whole time anyway. What made the fourth chapter of the Resident Evil series entertaining to me was all the batshit stuff that happens around the traditional zombie plot. There is a cloning subplot, and a creepy robot girl, and people with super powers, and none of it made much sense to me but it was all at least interesting. And look, I don't think I can even pin my confusion on the film-makers, I'm obviously joining this story in progress and there is a lot of lore that I simply don't understand. It was pretty fun to try and sort it all out, though, and even when that understanding continued to elude me, I enjoyed just soaking it in and seeing where it went next.
Nothing sounds more tedious to me than watching a poorly made zombie movie that follows the template to a tee. This zombie movie features Mila Jovovich acting like her character teleported in from The Matrix, an eerily accurate foretelling of Eleven versus Vecna from Stranger Things, and a (literal) murder of zombie crows divebombing a caravan of buses and fuel tankers. If you can't be great, at least be fun. I can't in good conscious actually recommend this movie to anyone, but I can appreciate the filmmakers for removing the shackles and treating me to one of the more entertaining versions of bad horror that I've had the pleasure to consume for this series.
*Decay of flesh, yes, but also decay of society, of course.
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